Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence On Owl Creek Bridge

The “Gilded Age” was a time when American society promoted a sprit of “brotherly love,” following Reconstruction. Likewise, magazines, essays, and histories of the Civil War generally celebrated “sanitized” battles cleansed from the horrors of combat. Ambrose Bierce, however, strayed from this popular narrative in his short stories, “An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge,” published in 1890 and “Chickamauga,” published in 1889. Moreover, the former Union officer criticized the glorification of battle with the use of dark realism and depictions of senseless death and violence. Simultaneously, however, in his short, first-hand account of battle in “A Little of Chickamauga,” published in 1898, he departs from scenes of destruction, and tactically explains
In “An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce illustrates the indiscriminate nature of death, and blurs line between reality and fantasy. Peyton Farquhar is a wealthy planter residing in the northern Alabama hills. Throughout the story, the reader subscribes to a fictional world as Farquhar’s death looms near. The southerner, captured by the Federal Army, attempted to sabotage the Union’s stockade and then

Bierce continued to juxtapose the playful nature of the child with the hideous scene that surrounds him. The the child is unencumbered by the death that plagues his back yard. Eventually a fire drew the child near to the site of a home—his home—where he found his mother lying dead. Vividly, Bierce, describes, the “frothy gray mass” protruding from her head. “Chickamauga” ends in the complete destruction of the boy’s home, drawing a parallel to the devastated country post